Western
Exhibitions is pleased to present an exhibition by husband-and-husband
artist team Miller & Shellabarger. The show opens on Friday,
October 15 with a reception, from 5 to 8pm, which is free and
open to the public.

This second showing at Western Exhibitions of Miller & Shellabarger's collaborative
pursuits will focus on works from several inter-related projects
including Volume 6 of their large-scale silhouette artist books,
documents from a recent performance involving funeral pyres
and intimate, discrete objects that utilize embroidery and carved
shells.

The silhouette is a key component in several of these new works.
Miller & Shellabarger first employed silhouettes in large-scale
artist books that contained their individual profiles, each
one cut by the other. We will show the most recent book in this
series as well as other silhouette-based works that use the
silhouette as a starting point, including conjoined beard silhouette
collages traced by friends and two embossed lead pieces that
feature similar imagery. We will also show larger-than-life,
phantasmagorical images, created during their "Summer
Studio" artist residency at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago's Sullivan Galleries in 2010 which take advantage
of the distortions of the silhouetted figure in light and shadow.
Life-size body tracings of each other are realized in large
drawings on paper made with gunpowder, and in a small book of
photographs of body tracings made with seeds.

Additional work will include a twin set of pillowcases, each
monogrammed with their initials using hair from their beards
as thread, a delicate cameo depicting the two with their beards
intertwined carved out of sardonic shell by an Italian master
carver, and photographs from a recent performance "Untitled
(Pyre)" where they found two naturally fallen trees in
the forest, chopped them, and stacked the fireplace-sized pieces
into roughly human-size forms, and burned these pyres at dusk.

Miller & Shellabarger are a 2009 recipient of the Peter
S. Reed Foundation Grant, 2008 recipient of an Artadia Award,
and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.
Their work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary
Art and the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario. In 2010 they
showed a major selection of work at the Institute of Contemporary
Art, Portland, Maine, participated in the Time-Based Arts (TBA)
festival in Portland, Oregon and will have a solo exhibition
in 2011 at the Illinois State University Galleries in Normal,
Illinois. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com,
Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash
Art, TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller
and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices.
They live and work in Chicago.

A recent article by Erin Rook, published in Just
Out, a GLBT publication in Portland, so perfectly
captures the meaning, process and spirit in their work that
we concluded Ms. Rook says it so much better than we could.
(Slightly edited for length. See full text here)

Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger explore the dynamics
of love and loss through performance pieces that emphasize
the artistic process as a metaphor for the cycles of life
and death, of connection and separation. The Chicago-based
couple has been creating collaborative works since they starting
dating 17 years ago, bringing together their respective fascinations
with the body to produce performance art that speaks to universal
themes in relationships in a distinctly physical way.

Their collective work focuses on the ways bodies relate. Past
performances have included braiding their beards together,
intentionally acquiring sunburn while embracing and a project
(ongoing since 2003) in which the men crochet opposite ends
of a pink tube that both separate and connect them.

Miller and Shellabarger’s art often challenges stereotypes
about gender and sexuality, sometimes intentionally and other
times inevitably. Many of the couple’s performances
incorporate a domestic element—crocheting, sewing, origami—and
their masculine appearance alone contradicts perceptions about
queer men. “Whether we want it to or not, because of
our relationship to one another, the personal becomes political,”
says 41-year-old Shellabarger. Miller adds that while his
own individual work has a clearly intentional queer focus,
their collective work does not. It’s simply “a
matter of fact.” More from Miller: “Just because
we’re two men and we’re in this relationship,
it’s queer. One of the things we hope is that it’s
something other people can look at and see themselves in,
both straight people and queer people.”

Still, as obvious as the nature of their relationship seems
to the artists, it doesn’t always translate. In Europe,
the couple has found their sexuality to be both understood
and a non-issue. “It seemed incredibly obvious to them
that we were [queer],” Shellabarger says. “So
their interpretation of the pieces often didn’t have
to do with that. It had to do with this relationship between
the two of us, they didn’t fixate on the fact that we
were queer.”

In the United States, however, audiences are resistant to
even acknowledge that they are queer, puzzling over what the
nature of their relationship could possibly be. “People
will ask us if we’re brothers, other people will think
we’re friends and some people will be in complete denial
even after we tell them,” Miller says. “There’s
this denial that masculine men are gay because gay men are
always effeminate, so it’s this constantly confronting
stereotypes.”

However perplexed some audiences may be by the exact nature
of their relationship, the threads running through the couple’s
recent work could not be more universal. Miller says they
have been inspired in part by “The Work of Mourning”
by Jacques Derrida.

In the piece the couple will be performing at the Time-Based
Arts Festival in Portland, Oregon, “Untitled (Graves),”
they explore connection through and beyond death. Miller and
Shellabarger will each dig a size-proportional grave (“Stan’s
will be taller and narrower, mine will be wider and shorter,”
Miller explains) on the grounds of Washington High. After
lying in the graves, they will dig a tunnel between the two
through which to hold hands. Whether the graves are a full
6-feet deep will depend on the terrain and weather. But regardless
of the depth, Miller says lying in them is a moving experience.
“You’re really thinking about death in a very
purposeful way that doesn’t necessarily occur in life
all the time and what it means to anticipate the loss of your
lover,” Miller says.

“Untitled (Graves)” is not the couple’s
first piece exploring death. Over the summer, the couple performed
“Untitled (Pyre)” in which they each cut up fallen
trees and piled them into stacks resembling funeral pyres
and burned them. “The two trees ended up serving as
doppelgangers, one for Dutes, one for myself,” Shellabarger
explains. “We … stacked them into a funeral pyre
so it was very column-like, making reference to the body and
then at sunset set them on fire. It was this idea of self-emulation,
or the destruction of, the disappearance of the body.”